Playful publishing ponder

A general (but short) ponder coming up!

I've tried to do some playful things with publishing books for library & related staff... starting with "Only Connect..." where we messed about with format quite a bit (and made it open access). I also wrote a book chapter in comic format that I was allowed to release OA too. Last year I tried writing and publishing a book in a pocket sized format (Mini book of teaching tips for librarians) to try and make it easy to dip into and very cheap to buy, with less of the "padding" you might get in a typical professional development book.

So... I was wondering whether we could do something else a tad playful that might be fun to create AND useful for people to access afterwards. Perhaps getting a bunch of people together to write something in 1 day (maybe 2)? If we had a bunch of people come together for a day, we could easily sketch out a structure and create a few pages worth of something in that day. If we want, that could be very informal (a zine?) that would then be pulled together immediately afterwards and made available primarily in electronic format (with a handful of paper copies for the attendees / writers). Slightly more ambitiously, if we're all locked in a room, it should be possible to write at least the first draft of a book chapter each (which would require coming ready to write, plan already in place). So could write a full edited book if we agreed a structure beforehand, came ready to write, then polished afterwards. Though realistically, "proper" chapters for a book might take a couple of days with some space in between the two days... plus decent amount of communication beforehand / between sessions online.

I'd be open to pretty much any subject matter to try out the idea, but here are a few possible ideas that might be suitable for the "library" world, but also up for wider education / learning support / fun stuff:

For a zine:

Information Literacy teaching ideas (of various flavours? Referencing? Searching? Critical reading?)
Found poetry
A selection of library walks (Psychogeographical style)
Playing in libraries (how to make libraries more "playful")
Cheap & free professional development ideas
Critical librarianship for beginners

For a book:

Information Literacy teaching ideas (of various flavours? Referencing? Searching? Critical reading?)
Playing in libraries (how to make libraries more "playful")
"Workbooks" for improving IL in particular student groups (e.g. IL for education students)
Critical librarianship examples  / studies / how to...
Getting diverse voices into librarianship

Also open to anonymising contributions / editors if people wanted to do something they felt might be controversial or career limiting as long as the topic had value.

To do something short & sweet (zine style) we could agree a topic online, meet somewhere free or cheap on a weekend(?) and create everything from scratch then.
To do something like a "proper" book (but as random / playful as people were up for), we'd probably have to agree a topic online, assign chapter authors / write abstracts and collect material for those chapters, meet for at least one day on a weekend somewhere free or cheap, then edit / tweak material afterwards. Plenty of online tools we could use to communicate for it... Slack maybe?

Would anyone be up for these sort of ideas? If so, talk about it on Twitter / whatever initially under #bookdisrupt hashtag? Then we'll see if we can make it happen if there is enough interest...

Random thought on boardgamers and playing seriously...

Just a random thought on board games / "serious" players of board games.

I've been following some discussions online where there are a high proportion of "serious" players of board games. That is, those people who play regularly, probably have a large collection of games, and who are "into" games enough to join groups online and IRL, to play and talk about them!

For some reason, I suddenly realised that many of these players don't actually like play. That is, they don't like the sort of play that the groupings I tend to associate with think of as play! I suppose much of this is summed up by Counterplay events and in individual form by people like Bernie De Koven.  Exploration, fun, freedom, randomness, non-competitiveness, are valued. Play with these groupings of people tends towards the free / spontaneous play that Callois called Paidia

The discussions in some of these board game groups often heavily criticise games because they include randomness, and a discussion the other day went further still. Some games I think are great specifically because they are short, fun, silly, with a strong random element were criticised for the same reasons that I like them!  It suggested that "good" games gave you "perfect knowledge" of the game, no randomness, with the winner always decided purely on how they apply that knowledge... and it is incredibly important to end up with a clear winner (including with collaborative games, winning against the game). I read this discussion and realised that these particular people were probably arguing that the only "proper" game is a controlled simulation. Any randomness, any chance someone could win by luck, was bad. Lots of them will play through a game on their own to see how it works before playing it with others, as the games are often complex and hard to understand - which fits in with the players with the best knowledge / skills wins. Their perfect game was entirely Ludic (see Callois again) - so the opposite end of the play spectrum.

I  wonder is this observation seems right to other people? Does the board game community tend towards this Ludic idea of play and reject the Paidic end as somehow "wrong"?

It's interesting to me as I also see it the other way round, with strictly controlled rules and boundaries (which the board gamers value) seen as "bad play" by some of the people on the other end of the spectrum! I just see them as different and valuable  / interesting in different ways...

A couple of experimental books

I've just created a couple of experimental books, both will be deliberately short and cheap, first is available through my website from the 2nd week of January.

The first book is a small (A6) sized, spiral bound book, printed on a heavy paper stock. It contains over 50 teaching tips and teaching ideas for librarians. Originally intended as a collection of (large sized) playing cards, I thought I'd try it in this format to see if people found it useful - a similar size to a large, Tarot sized, card, in spiral bound format it works out much cheaper to buy! This will only be available for a limited time, then revised based on feedback - I particularly want people to tell me if they like the size (A6) or would like it larger (A5?)! Because I *really* want feedback on this, the first few copies will be free P&P (in UK), and it will just cost £9.95 in total to your door...

The second will be based around creating escape rooms for educational purposes... not sure when this will be available, or if I will do a Kickstarter or not (creating a limited edition 1st of all, before releasing it in an alternative format?), around escape rooms with this workbook as a reward. More news when I decide!!!

More workshops - Manchester & London

More workshops! This time they're slightly shorter...

I've just arranged two more workshops, this time half day (afternoon only) ones and tried to make them as affordable as possible for new professionals and students.

The first is in Manchester on 15th May, the second in London on 13th June.

I've tweaked the content and reduced the timings so they'll fit into an afternoon. This saves money on catering, room hire, and in the case of London, travel & accommodation! It'll still be touch and go whether they break even, but I thought it was worth doing to give more new professionals and students the chance to attend. I've had feedback in the past from people who wanted to go, but their employers wouldn't fund them and they couldn't afford a full priced event. This is their chance!

BTW - do you like my new logo? This is to cover all the bits and pieces I do out of my "normal" job, such as these workshops and the new affordable LIS publishing house I've started.

MIL vs IL at the European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL)

Not strictly related to Games for Libraries, but I did present on Play and Games for Information Literacy for the ECIL conference. I'll pop a link to what I presented on this blog later ... A few quick thoughts on the tension between Media Information Literacy (MIL) and Information Literacy (IL) as it came up at the ECIL conference! All typed on my phone while taking the children swimming between arriving back from ECIL and setting off to Legoland, so apologies for the typos and rushed, half thought through arguments! Something that kept on coming up at ECIL was the use of the term MIL rather than IL, as per UNESCO (link). This was even to the extent that Ralph Catts in his summing up urged us to switch to using MIL as the preferred term. There were a few reasons for this, largely around it being a broader, more inclusive term. Something that Media Literacy & Information Literacy people could agree on and work under. To illustrate, Ralph asked us which was the broader term - information or media literacy. Most of the room thought 'information', but he said doing the same at a media literacy conference brought back the opposite result. All well and good, but I think this approach is seriously mistaken. First of all, and slightly facetiously, why stop there? Surely Digital Media Information Literacy Skills Fluency would be even better? In fact, I'd argue the opposite. The more 'literacies' you try to bring into the label of a concept, the less inclusive it becomes. Artificially trying to bring groups together just creates even more splinter terms and groups, creating less unity rather than more. When I talk about information literacy I tend to be thinking out of the experiential / relational approach largely originating from Christine Bruce and her colleagues at QUT. That is fairly different from the heavily competency based approach that dominates in the US thanks to the ALA / ACRL standards. I recognise, however, that we are talking about the ideas even though we are coming from different angles at it and I'm really glad they still sit under the same label. The same is true of media literacy, information fluency, meta literacy, or many other of the 'literacies' people talk about, they are different lenses through which we view largely the same things. We all think our term is the broadest because it is - for us. We are looking at broadly similar things from different angles. These things aren't subsets of each other (like Ralph's set picture), they are largely *overlapping* sets. Each new term creates the same problem - someone from outside sees it as smaller, whatever the intention behind it, such as to create a wider encompassing set! Using MIL just creates another largely meaningless splinter term that people spend time & energy defining and arguing about. Surely it's better to publish in each other's journals, speak at each other's conferences, and attempt to break the artificial borders through taking the wider, relational view, rather than picking a new name for a concept (& conference)? I'll think a bit more about how we can do this, starting with the stuff we do through the Information Literacy Group in the UK.